Strategic Link Building
How we delivered consistent, quality links that follow EEAT guidelines to give Mo increased brand visibility, tangible SEO benefits and elevate their SERP rankings.
Mo provides companies with the tools to build positive workplace cultures through recognition, rewards and engagement.
The Scope
The post-pandemic boom in remote working has created a highly competitive space for businesses offering tools and services to support employee engagement. Mo approached Brick Digital with a need to grow their backlink profile and increase their SERP rankings for specific keywords. As part of an ongoing SEO strategy that encompassed both on-site and off-site activity, we engaged in link building on Mo’s behalf, seeking to develop their backlink profile and increase online brand visibility.
Industrial-organisational psychologist and data scientist Andrew Naber posits that the average person will spend 90,000 hours at work – around 1/3rd of a person’s lifetime.
With work consuming that much of our time (and financing our livelihood) it’s a topic of great interest in the digital space for both employees and employers. Alongside the niche interest of employee recognition, we knew that Mo’s expert voice could be applied to a multitude of conversation-starting themes around the world of work – positioning them as a “thought leader” on the cutting edge of workplace culture.
As a standard rule of thumb, our link-building articles should strike a balance between achieving topical relevance to a client’s niche and captivating the interest of site editors and their audiences. We also needed to merge planned content with spontaneous, reactive pieces, allowing us to marry firm strategy with adaptable flexibility to capitalise on Mo’s link-building potential.
With this in mind, our research began with our Link Building team gaining an understanding of the overall search landscape around employment.
As our first motion, we identified trending themes in work and employment, with the aim of “hijacking” these naturally-occurring interests. If team leaders were searching for tips to improve their workplace culture, we wanted Mo’s articles to be among the top results to appear.
From the resulting data, we mapped out the broad topics around the world of work to focus on through the year. Each change in topic marked a new “marathon” of article generation, prospecting and outreach. To ensure relevance, each theme was selected strategically, to appear online at the best possible time for it to be seen.
When planning our approach for any link-building campaign, we carefully map out a plan for the anchor texts we intend to use to build links and the topical relevance of the websites we place content on. Beyond this, the sites we approach for coverage undergo strict quality checks against Google’s guidelines. Of course, we aim to place content on similar sites to competitors, but we also seek links from websites that are less popular among them – a strategy that helps to build a natural, highly competitive profile of backlinks.
For Mo, we began by exploring workplace management and culture, with articles sharing tips on creating a positive work environment, addressing generational differences in the workplace and offering advice to new management. By the end of the first push, we had generated backlinks on the likes of Business Money, London Loves Business and MSN.
Q2 took a more targeted approach, highlighting the benefits of employee recognition schemes in a variety of industries – a campaign that resulted in more niche coverage from the likes of Money Magpie, eCommerce Fastlane and The Retail Bulletin. We also tackled the exceptionally important topic of mental health in the workplace during Mental Health Awareness Week.
Rounding off our work with Mo, we created an article in celebration of “the little guys” in business, highlighting the benefits of working with MSMEs (micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises) ahead of the annual observance of MSME Day.
Each theme for link building was selected with strategy in mind, taking into consideration the seasonality of search to enhance the relevance of the content produced. Aside from generating strong, valuable backlinks for Mo, all content was designed to inform and educate – positioning the Mo as a knowledgeable expert and authoritative voice in their industry and striking off all the boxes of Google’s EEAT checklist.
Backlinks from niche-relevant websites
Combined organic readers
Organic traffic increase
